I'm not a stranger to criticisms of MSFT, and I've been clear on the areas
criticizing specific components although occassionally when something with a
low IQ misreads it believes that I have a blanket anti-MSFT posture which is
totally delusional. However if you want to talk to MSFT, this is a peer to
peer group and MSFT is in here rarely. Darrell Gorter and Jill Zoeller do
try to help--Darrell and Jill were more active at times on the TBT groups
and Jilol has a very helpful blog, but they show up here rarely, and in
the context of the way they have set up their message rules for Win Mail on
their boxes for topics that are of interest to them.
You can really feedback more directly by going to the active Windows Vista
Team Blog if you want your feedback read by MSFT. That blog is run by Nick
White. If I were you, I'd paste your comments that I know are sinceere and
well thought out and make them in that blog where you will be talking
directly to MSFT.
1) One care, I think is a pretty decent product at a decent price
considering 3 licences for as cheap as $31 in some of my country's stores.
I've been using it since the start and it seems to work very well with Vista
(1.5 Beta). If you have feedback, there is a WOC Live blog to directly
email them and there is are also a number of public groups that they DO
monitor closely. You should give them a lot of feedback because it is still
in Beta and you have chance to make some impact. Unlike the tin ear that
is congenital and irreviersible pathology among the Vista team members, they
will listen. They don't have the immense arrogance of Vista team members
who believe their customers are dirt.
One Care Team Blog
http://windowsonecare.spaces.live.com
Vista team members work for MSFT who has an OEM VP Scott Di Valerio who has
so little regard for MSFT customers that he actively leans on OEM named
partners harder than you ever saw Tony Soprano lean on the owner of a New
Jersey pizza joint. The last thing MSFT wants is a discussion on why they
refuse to ship Vista DVDs with preinstalled boxes which were 20% of their
profit increase last quarter while retain sales of Windows decreased 20%.
MSFT has a huge potential profit center in on line advertising, but because
they have a bullying culture at times, Yusuf Mehdi and Debra Chrapaty,
Corporate VP MSN supressed its growth as did the woman who tried to pioineer
it at MSFT's boss. Yusuf's new job title has been shaped by the MSN
employee who was repeatedly called stupid. That article, recently from the
Wall Street Journal on Google kicking MSFT's ass is appended at the end of
this for your reading enlightenment. The woman' whose ideas will make
billions for MSFT was called in and yelled at regularly by her boss and
labled "stupid" which is a high sophisticated IT term that would take the
creative writing of Jill Zoeller [MSFT] and Darrell Gorter [MSFT] to
explain. It is probably somewhere in an IT dictionary.
The Story of MSFT's David Cole Bullying their Employee Joanne Bradford and
the Huge Profit Center She Helped Open Up is Here
http://www.mediainfocenter.org/story.asp?story_id=100335522
Yusuf Mehd now has taken the title Senior Vice President, Chief Advertising
Strategist and much of the credit for this new direction towards a revenue
cash cow for them is Jo Anne Bradford's
I applaud MSFT for making it easier to backup with the WOC backup, although
they made a bad miscalculation without the ability to backup at the file
level as easily as it could have been done. It takes less CPU and less real
estate and to me is a quantum leap over the bugginess and byzantine Norton
KBs which are rarely updated uniformly.
Also Norton has been manipulative delivering superficial changes since XP
SP2 came on the scene via Live Update and most importantly Norton interferes
with Outlook and OE Send via it's spam detection and has done little to fix
this for over two years. One Care did early on in the Beta, and this was
fixed during one of the Betas about the 2nd or 3rd Beta update.
2) Your criticism of UAC has an awful lot of agreement and MSFT will learn
come February as the calls start pouring in when the general public starts
getting Vista about the scope of problems with UAC implementation. If you
hope to effect change there, you should send your comments to the UAC team
via MSFT''s feedback mechanisms since their blog closed Nov. 8, 2006 but it
still has good screenshotted articles on UAC.
Jimmy Brush on this group has made a number of excellent posts on navigating
UAC over the months as have several others. You may want to search by his
name. I'm not sure what controls how far search is able to go
back--probably it is a server side control at the Redmond server farm.
I agree having to take ownership of folders repeatedly when you are admin is
a real pain. It is going to result in a high percentage of users turning
off UAC very quickly and permanatly but it will be a huge selling point to
MSFT for enterprises which is where there energy has been focused with it.
Perhaps Linux and Unix OS's implement something analagous to UAC far better,
at least many people who work with both say that's the case. Maybe some
people will weigh in on that.
There is also a large MSFT sycophant compnonet who will praise UAC to the
skys not considering how many users will turn it off of the projected 400
million Vista individual desktops by 24 months on the MSFT slide for this.
Garner has a slide that is far less optimistic for Vista migration. That
slide is here:
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2006/12/01/business/20061201_VISTA_GRAPHIC.html
3) If a lot of eye candy is evident in Vista, I sure am missing it. I'd like
to know where. Surely it's not in the Vista icons or wall paper or Aero
Glass. If you confer TGTSoft's or Stardock's Object Desktop on it or
other 3rd parties then I believe you get some genuine eye candy.
4) "So, is Microsoft again using paying customers as "beta" testers? "
Every RTM is still really a beta so the answer is of course. What was RTM'd
Nov. 7, 2006 as Vista is what is really a Beta One.
5) MSFT's newest anti piracy move, SPP like the erratic WGA is being
addressed by many groups of attorneys in federal district court in the
Eastern District of Washington by class action suits and in the other of
the 93 district courts in the United States. I don't track litigation that
much in other countries, but the European litigation has been a huge money
hemorrhage for MSFT pushing towards a billion and growing when you consider
fines and legal fees. It is the poster child for corporate litigation
hemorrhage by Brad Smith, VP and General Counsel.
CH
New Tricks: How Microsoft Is Learning to Love Online Advertising
By Robert A. Guth
The Wall Street JournalNovember 16, 2006
When Joanne Bradford joined Microsoft Corp. in 2001 as head of online
advertising sales, it quickly became clear to her that advertising was a
lower life form at the software giant. Her direct boss called her ideas
"stupid," she recalls. In one meeting in 2004, a representative of General
Motors Corp. berated her for Microsoft's terrible service.
Ms. Bradford had run afoul of a Microsoft corporate culture that elevated
technology above all else. The bias would soon haunt the company as it
struggled to compete with Google Inc., a company that rose to prominence
through the power of online advertising. For Microsoft, says company Vice
President Yusuf Mehdi, " advertising was a bad word."
Today, Microsoft is making up for lost time. It now has a fully staffed
sales force on par with the rest of the Internet industry. It's investing in
a broad range of services for placing ads on the Web, in videogames, on
mobile phones and alongside Internet search results.
In the latest signal that Microsoft has gotten the online-ad religion, a
company official said yesterday that Ms. Bradford, 43 years old, will soon
be named to head its MSN online group, which runs a Web site delivering
news, video and services such as email and instant messaging. The promotion
makes Ms. Bradford a central figure in Microsoft's fight against Google and
Internet darlings such as YouTube and MySpace.
For years, Microsoft's culture equated smarts with pure technical
brainpower. The company's internal systems, from hiring to strategic
planning, were structured around building and licensing software, notably
Microsoft's core Windows and Office products, which are still responsible
for most of its revenue and profit. Engineering talent gravitated toward
those businesses. Most of Microsoft's sales efforts revolved around managing
large corporate buyers of software.
The growing role of advertising on the Web has put Microsoft in the
uncomfortable position of being a laggard while Google's market share
continues to grow. In the quarter ended Sept. 30, Google's revenue was $2.69
billion, virtually all of which came from online advertising. Microsoft's
online group posted online advertising revenue of $374 million in the same
quarter.
Online advertising has emerged as the foundation stone of a whole host of
new Web businesses. Research eMarketer forecasts that the market will
balloon to $25 billion in 2010 from $15.9 billion today. As a result,
Microsoft has started to learn what makes advertisers tick as a way to get
deep into a business that's as much Madison Avenue salesmanship as Silicon
Valley genius.
Yesterday's news is part of a broader effort being led by Steve Berkowitz, a
senior vice president who was plucked from IAC/InterActiveCorp in April to
inject new blood into the company's online businesses. Mr. Berkowitz says
Microsoft needs to attract consumers by better melding its technology
services with its content offerings. "If you have an audience, advertisers
will come," he says.
Mr. Berkowitz acknowledges Microsoft was slow to take advertising seriously.
" I think every day it's becoming more of an advertising company than it was
the day before," he says.
Ms. Bradford has been a catalyst for that change, although at times her
brash style made her an ineffective evangelist for Web advertising. In a
2004 performance review, a colleague praised her leadership skills and her
"deep knowledge" of advertisers. But it also described the "downward spiral"
of relations with her peers that resulted in Ms. Bradford being
"condescending and most of all cynical," according to a copy of the review.
The reviewer called for "a new start" in Ms. Bradford's dealings with her
bosses. She acknowledges these shortcomings.
That same year, after a company meeting, Ms. Bradford confided to her
husband from a hotel in Atlanta that she didn't know what she was doing
working for Microsoft. "These people don't like me," she recalls telling
him.
Ms. Bradford joined Microsoft as head of MSN's 115-strong ad-sales team in
late 2001 after 13 years selling print ads for McGraw-Hill Cos.
publications, including BusinessWeek. A journalism major from San Diego
State University, she had none of the technological skills admired at
Microsoft. For her, the gift of gab and a memory for names and faces were
the talents necessary to coax advertising from America's largest companies.
A month after joining Microsoft, Ms. Bradford saw a copy of Advertising Age
magazine that ranked Internet sites by how well they satisfied ad agencies.
MSN was last, "more interested in pushing its services than understanding
advertisers," the survey concluded. Clients told her first-hand about
Microsoft's unresponsive sales teams and unreliable systems. Ads got lost.
Bills were late. A Microsoft spokesman says the company acknowledges these
problems.
Ms. Bradford sought to educate the company from the top. In late 2002, she
escorted Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer on a trip to visit
advertisers including Hollywood movie studios and Toyota Motor Corp. On the
plane, she gave him a 26-page paper on the state of the ad business. He
burned through it in about 10 minutes and spent the rest of the flight
firing off questions, some of which she says she couldn't answer. His
data-oriented approach was a dramatic change from the media world she had
recently left.
Microsoft at the time didn't have a team that could design special campaigns
for advertisers launching new products. Ms. Bradford managed to line up a
budget, Web designers and support from other Microsoft technicians to the
surprise of some of her colleagues.
Progress in securing resources endeared Ms. Bradford to the sales team.
Occasional stunts helped, too. At one point, she told 300 MSN people she'd
give $500 to anyone who could name everyone in the room. She paid the two
who managed the feat out of her own pocket.
But she was gaining little headway with Microsoft's upper management. At
that time, MSN was focused on competing with Time Warner Inc.'s America
Online in the old-fashioned Internet access business. Both companies were
caught off guard when consumers bypassed them by switching to high-speed
broadband lines. MSN's subscriber revenues plummeted just as an upstart
named Google came on the scene without a dial-up operation but with a
growing advertising business.
On a January 2004 trip to New York, Ms. Bradford watched her staff at work
and noticed that top salespeople were spending too much time in the office.
Because the system for processing ads was slow and confusing, they spent too
much time doing technical work instead of going out to visit clients. At a
meeting, Ms. Bradford told the group, "I will get you more help."
Microsoft executives -- and the Internet industry at large -- were unsure
how deep the pool of online advertising would become. By 2004, Google
started taking in immense profits through an automated system that ran ads
alongside relevant search results. Soon, Google found a way to syndicate the
system around the Internet, allowing thousands of small Web publishers to
run ads, provided by Google, at zero cost. Both parties split the revenue.
The concept upended the traditional media business.
A year earlier, according to people involved in the discussions, Microsoft
had walked away from negotiations to buy Google competitor Overture, the
company that pioneered Internet ad-brokering. When Yahoo snapped up the
company for $ 1.63 billion, a sense of regret pervaded Microsoft -- it
should have been more aggressive, some insiders say. Instead, the company
started investing in its own search technology and a version of Overture.
As Ms. Bradford pushed her agenda, she sparked tensions with her boss, David
Cole, the senior vice president in charge of MSN, and a veteran manager of
Microsoft software projects. Mr. Cole brought to the table a healthy dose of
traditional Microsoft thinking, say people who have worked with him. At MSN,
Mr. Cole's focus was on shoring up the money-losing group and improving its
services such as email and instant messaging.
Ms. Bradford battled Mr. Cole, who at times would pound his fist on the
table and deride her proposals as "stupid," say several participants in
their meetings, including Ms. Bradford. In a sign of protest in 2004, a
group of MSN salespeople walked into a meeting with Mr. Cole wearing black
T-shirts with " Where are the Ads?" emblazoned on the back.
Looking back, Ms. Bradford says their spats were respectful. "David and I
liked to have a healthy open debate," she says. "He supported me, but did
push back." Mr. Cole has been on a leave of absence from Microsoft since
March and could not be reached for comment.
In late 2004, Ms. Bradford hosted a meeting between GM and Mr. Cole. She
says she coached her GM guests the night before not to pull any punches. The
next day, GM said it was boosting online advertising, but that Microsoft
didn't have enough salespeople in Detroit to serve the auto maker, says Curt
Hecht, chief digital officer of GM Planworks, a unit of media-buying firm
Starcom MediaVest.
On weekends, Ms. Bradford sought refuge 700 miles south of Seattle near San
Francisco where she lives with her husband and two children. It was a life
so far removed from Microsoft that Ms. Bradford's young daughter for a time
thought that her mother was in the golf business, thanks to a box of
MSN-branded golf balls sitting in the family's home office.
Ms. Bradford decided to change her approach. Instead of simply arguing the
point, she gave the Microsoft techies what they love: computer-generated
data. She ordered a survey of the entire sales force, collecting details on
how every member spent each day, from routine administrative tasks to
meeting with customers. For any given revenue projection, it listed the
number of staff needed. For the first time, she was able to put numbers into
the art of ad sales. She offered a deal -- provide the people, and she'd
guarantee the revenue.
Those meetings helped set up Ms. Bradford for Microsoft's annual hiring
meeting, held every May, where in the past her ideas had been shot down.
Armed with the latest data, she made her case for hiring hundreds of new
sales staff. She got the OK from Mr. Cole.
Nationwide, Microsoft tripled the number of sales support staff to about
150. In Detroit, over the same period, the sales group doubled to 12,
poaching salespeople from Yahoo Inc., AOL and BusinessWeek. With these new
workers, GM decided to boost its business with MSN. "Joanne is making a
difference," GM Planworks' Mr. Hecht says.
The sales group, which Ms. Bradford will continue to run until she starts
her new duties, is now central to Microsoft's advertising strategy. It's an
important part of two recent deals the company has struck. Microsoft in
April bought Massive Inc., a start-up that had developed technology for
placing ads alongside videogames. In August, it struck a deal to provide ads
on the social- networking site Facebook Inc.
Since September Ms. Bradford's team has been pitching a broad package of
Microsoft properties and partners to advertisers. Her next task is to build
services under the MSN brand -- online video and music, for instance -- that
will attract consumers and advertisers.
